I like the New Republic. It offers first class political analysis and cultural criticism, with a team of excellent writers. And yet, as a long time reader, I’ve always had qualms over a latent anti-Catholicism that seems to pervades this publication. The recent issue bought this home to me, with two articles.
The first, by John Judis, analyzed Rudy Giuliani’s dictatorial tendencies and his penchant for authoritarianism, attributing these traits to his Catholic education and to Catholic social teaching in particular. There is no mention whatsoever of the Declaration on Religious Liberty, or the well-established principle that coercive law should not be concerned with private morality (and the Murray point that it should even tread lightly in the domain of public morality). There is no mention of prohibition, a pure product of Protestant theology. There is no mention of the fact that many of the so-called “neocons” who are rallying behind Giuliani are, in fact, Jewish. No, everything bad about Rudy can be blamed on his Catholic upbringing.
And then there is a promising article by Anthony Grafton, which argues that the use of torture during the medieval period proved counterproductive, as victims would readily confess to all sorts of “crimes”, such as meeting the devil at a witch’s coven. This sounded like a good article, relavant to the modern day. But it turned out to be nothing more than an anti-Catholic diatribe. He focuses on a single case– the trial of three Jewish boys in Trent in 1475 for supposedly murdering a Christian boy and using his blood to carry out the Passover ritual (the standard medieval anti-Semitic blood libel). From reading this article, however, one would think that medieval torture was largely a product of the Catholic Church (through the Inquisition), and directed uniquely against the Jews. There is no mention that torture to extract confession, an artifact of Roman law, was standard in the jurisprudence of the time, and that the Inquisition was well known for being far more lenient than the secular arm. There is no mention that Jews were not a main target of the Inquisition (except perhaps in Spain, where the Inquisition was arm of the state, directed by Los Reyes Catolicos). There is no mention of the fact that far more “witches” were tortured and killed in Protestant Europe than in Catholic Europe. And then, when Grafton is talking about the kinds of confessions that come out of torture, he quotes the following statement from a “suspect… defying his torturers”:
“PODESTA: What did he think of the Christian faith?
ISRAEL: He wants to say the truth. He does not believe in anything of the Christian faith. … It is a joke to say that God came down from heaven to earth, walked around and lived among men. He believes only in God and nothing more. He believes also that the Jewish faith is right and holy.”
You can almost hear the sneering and condescending tone by which the author (using the words of a long-dead Jewish man) disparages the essence of the Christian faith. For this is the true point of the article, and it’s something the New Republic has been doing for some time. Its cranky and unreadable literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, has a history of making snide comments not just over the behavior of Christians, but about the Christian system of belief itself. And of course, the New Republic gleefully published an extended excerpt from Daniel Goldhagen’s savage attack on Pope Pius XII.
I think it’s clear what’s going on here. While the New Republic adopts a center-left approach to domestic politics and economics, it stakes out a harsh pro-Israel position that can compete readily with anything on the right. Its long-time editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, is famous as a hater of Arabs, and a supporter of far-right elements in Israeli society (in fact, he is probably a true anti-Semite, as Semites encompass Arabs). Recently, the magazine savaged Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer for having the audacity to write a book about the Israeli lobby and US foreign policy.
Ultimately, the New Republic embodies a certain aspect of American opinion that can see no wrong in Israel, and refuses to support equal rights for the Palestinians. Viewed through that prism, it is easy to see why it distrusts the Vatican, and despises Catholicism. It cannot accept the teaching that God has abrogated “land grants” in the sense of favoring a particular political entity as His own. The Church is universal. It cannot accept the Vatican’s fair-minded position that Israelis and Palestinians have equal claim to human rights and human dignity. This kind of Israel supporter is more comfortable with the batty theology of the American fundamentalist right that requires the re-establishment of Israel to its Davidic borders as a way to bring back the Lord. And, perhaps most important of all, it cannot forgive the Vatican for not supporting the founding of the modern state of Israel in the first place. Remember, the Vatican has never recognized the existence of the state de jure, only de facto. This, I believes, lies behind the anti-Catholicism of the New Republic.
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